Creating an Offer

Last Modified April 23, 2019|
Originally Posted April 23, 2019

Your platform is based on a core concept called “offers”: promotions of products or services that your network is going to provide for partners to drive traffic to. Before partners can run any traffic in your network, they need offers to promote.

This article walks you through creating an offer in TUNE, and provides links to articles that provide detailed information on related topics.

Before You Begin

In TUNE, go to Offers > Create Offer. Once on the Create Offer page, you’ll do three things: enter details about the offer, place the offer conversion pixel, and finally test your offer. We use example information in this article. You can use your own, or use ours just so you get a feel for the offer creation process.

You can always edit an offer later. This walkthrough is meant to be simple. Everything about the offer you create can be edited later, and you can delete the offer after finishing this tutorial.

Note: Changing information that relates to offer stats such as advertiser, advertiser manager, or partner manager won’t retroactively update stats accumulated from before that change. Read our Using the Stats Report article for more information on stats reporting.

Step 1: Know Your Offer

When creating an offer in your platform, you’ll need to prepare some information about the offer from that offer’s advertiser. If you’re new to performance marketing, start with our Intro to Performance Marketing article for an overview of industry terminology and concepts.

Essential Details

This tutorial walks through entering essential details important to every offer:

Name of the product or service being offered

A short description of that product or service

URL from the advertiser to track impressions, clicks, and other actions you provide for that offer (known as the “offer URL”)

Available parameters for that offer URL

URL that shows a preview of the offer without that tracking (known as the “preview URL”)

Revenue and payout actions and amounts

Other Details

Though you only need a few details to successfully save your offer, there are many details your partners want to know regarding the offer. Here are just a handful of examples, some of which we touch on in this walkthrough:

Policy on length of and required action for conversion

When the offer expires

Targeted countries

Allowed and denied types of traffic

Operating system or device type

Demographic information (for social media-based offers)

Creatives and allowed creative usage

Goals

Offer caps

App file size (for mobile app offers)

Our Example Offer

As you walk through creating your offer, we use an example offer from a fictitious advertiser named Super Fantastic Games. The details we have from our advertiser are:

Name of Product: Most Awesome Game

Offer Type: Free mobile app

Country: Canada

Short Description: Most Awesome Game Offer is a brand new game from Super Fantastic Games. 50 levels of sci-fi action puzzles!

Once You Have the Details

With this information in hand, we can make our offer.

Step 2: Enter Offer Details

The first section of this form is Details, where you enter in the offer’s basic information. Fill in each field to the best of your ability; you can always change these values after the offer is created.

General Offer Information

Advertiser: This is the advertiser for this offer, form the list of advertisers defined in your network. If you haven’t set up any advertisers yet, leave this blank. You can edit the offer later to set the advertiser.

Name: This is the name of the product for this offer. Give your offer a clear name that your partners will understand. Some clients include other information here, such as operating system or device type, target countries and regions, or file size.

Offer Classifications & Tags

Classifications and tags help organize offers in your network, both for network employees and partners with whom you work.

Channel: This classification describes the advertising channel for this offer. In this walkthrough, let’s assume we want to promote this offer on mobile devices.

Operating System: This classification describes the operating system for this offer. In this walkthrough, the product only applies to iOS devices.

Incentive: This classification describes the incentive status of the offer. In this walkthrough, our advertiser set a traffic restriction of no incentivized traffic.

Vertical: This classification describes the market segment addressed by the offer. In this walkthrough, the product is a mobile game.

Conversion Type: This classification describes the conversion type for the offer. In this walkthrough, our advertiser accepts app installation and app open as the conversion.

Media Placements: This classification describes the ad locations for the offer. Some examples of media placements are blog, email, and video placements.

Tags: Offer tags are customizable labels you can also apply to advertisers and partners in your network. In this walkthrough, we won’t use any tags.

Other Offer Information

The above fields are useful for identifying and organizing offers, but partners need more information they can use to decide on offers they want to run. Two of these fields, Preview URL and Default Offer URL, should be provided to you by the offer’s advertiser. For this example, you don’t need to worry about these elements.

Description: This is a brief summary of the offer. Partners viewing this offer will read the description to have an idea of what is being promoted. You can use standard HTML formatting in this field. For information like traffic restrictions (such as “no incentivized traffic”), it’s good practice to use the separate offer classification dropdown menus instead. These provide a more streamlined reporting experience for you, and save space in the description as well.

Note: For security purposes, the embed, object, and script HTML tags are not displayed or rendered in the your platform.

Preview URL: This is the URL where partners can view the offer landing page from, or where the traffic ends up at when they click on a partner’s tracking link or banner. This URL must begin with “http://” or “https://”. Typically, this is the page your offer redirects to after clicking on the tracking link, but that’s not required. Preview URLs can be up to 500 characters long. This field should be provided to you by the offer’s advertiser.

Default Offer URL: This is the URL where traffic is redirected by your network to track the user session. There is where you include any values pertinent to the advertiser, such as a partner’s ID value or a session transaction ID. Like with the Preview URL, this field needs to start with “http://” or “https://”. Offer URLs can be up to 2048 characters long. This field should be provided to you by the offer’s advertiser.

It’s likely that you’ll later want to dynamically insert different values into the default offer URL for your advertiser. To learn more about that process, read our Passing Values to an Offer URL article.

Important: Don’t confuse Default Offer URL with Preview URL.The Default Offer URL is where traffic flows after offers are clicked on. The Preview URL is used by partners to preview where the offer will direct traffic.

Conversion Tracking: This setting tells the ad server how to handle tracking a user’s click and conversion. The default is “HTTP iFrame Pixel”. The options here are complex and explained in basic terms in our Attribution Methods in TUNE article. The first four are “client-side” methods of tracking clicks and conversions, meaning they rely on the user’s browser for tracking. We’ll explain what “client-side” means in a moment.

HTTP iFrame Pixel: The most common client-side method for tracking clicks and conversions.

HTTPS iFrame Pixel: Same as “HTTP iFrame Pixel”, except it uses a secure connection (HTTPS). This is important for ads also using HTTPS.

HTTP Image Pixel: The method to use if you run into problems using an iFrame Pixel.

HTTPS Image Pixel: Same as “HTTP Image Pixel”, except it uses a secure connection (HTTPS). This is important for ads also using HTTPS.

The last two methods are “server-side,” meaning they use code embedded in an advertiser’s site to track the click and conversion.

Server Postback w/Transaction ID: The best method for tracking clicks and conversions.

Server Postback w/Partner ID: The method to use if you run into problems with using transaction ID.

The difference between “client-side” and “server-side” has to do with how conversions are tracked. Server-side methods are by far more reliable, but they’re more complex and technical than client-side methods, and not every partner can use server-side methods.

For our example, we leave the field with “HTTP iFrame Pixel” selected. When you aren’t sure which option to select, leave “HTTP iFrame Pixel” selected and edit the offer later if needed.

Status: With this setting you can set the status of the offer to be:

Active: The offer is visible to partners. Partners can access it and run traffic to it.

Paused: Paused offer traffic can have a redirect offer to redirect to so the user can still convert. Offers that pass their Expiration Date (see below) act like paused offers.

Pending: The offer is able to be tested. You can run manually clicks and conversions to test it, but the offer doesn’t show or is available to partners.

Deleted: The offer can’t be viewed in the partner’s end. (You can retrieve deleted offers later in the Manage Offers page.)

By default, offers are set to the “Pending” status. We recommend keeping the offer set to “Pending” while setting it up, and setting it to “Active” once everything is ready for partners to promote.

Expiration Date: This is the date when this offer expires. All offers have an expiration date, and act like paused offers (but stay listed as their previous status) starting on this date. By default, the expiration date is one year from today’s date.

Categories: This is where you select one or more offer categories to associate with this offer from the list of active categories you’ve made for your network. You won’t see this field if you have no offer categories set up. For more information on this topic, read our article on Offer Categories.

Reference ID: This is a value that you can pass through the Default Offer URL for your own purposes.

Note: Here, you can write notes to yourself and other network administrators. Partners in your network cannot see this note, so don’t put anything in this field that you want them to see. Include all notes you want partners to have in your Details field.

Done with Entering Details

Once you’re done entering information in the Details section, move on to entering revenue and payout.

Step 3: Enter Revenue & Payout

The sections after offer details are: Currency, Revenue, Payout, Goals, Settings, and Tracking. Now that you’ve entered information in the Details sections, we’ll progress through two other crucial offer elements: Revenue and Payout. This tutorial skips past the other sections, though it gives a brief description for each section, with links to related support articles.

Currency (Skipped)

If you have an Enterprise account, you can set the currency for individual offers. For information on setting up and using multiple currencies in your network, read our article on using multiple currencies.

Revenue

This section covers accounting for your revenue type, method, and amount you earn from your advertisers. Revenue and payout (the following section) are covered in detail in our Offer Payouts article.

For our example, we use the default “Revenue per Conversion” type and default method, and enter “3” in Revenue per Conversion—meaning we will earn $3 per conversation, or $3 RPA.

Revenue can contain five decimal places ($0.00000).

Revenue Type: This selection indicates what form of payout you expect from the advertiser. In brief:

Revenue per Sale (RPS): Percentage amount you earn of total sales from conversions.

Revenue per Conversion plus Revenue per Sale (RPA + RPS): Both of the above combined.

Revenue per Click (RPC): Flat amount you earn per unique click.

Revenue per Thousand Impressions (RPM): Flat amount you earn for every 1,000 impressions.

Revenue Method: This option indicates which revenue model to use, whether it’s the default model or another such as tiered revenue or revenue groups. You’ll likely only see “Default” available unless you’ve gone further in setting up your network than we expected in this article.

Revenue per Conversion: This is the amount you earn based on the revenue type. Depending on what you have selected as your Revenue Type, this entry changes:

Payout

This section covers accounting for the payout type, method, and amount that your publishers earn. This section is set up similar to the Revenue section above; both sections are covered in the Offer Payouts article. For our example, we use the default “Cost per Conversion” type and default method, and enter “2” in Cost per Conversion—meaning we will earn $2 per conversation, or $2 CPA. That makes our profit per conversion $1.

Like with revenue, payout can contain five decimal places ($0.00000).

Payout Type: This selection indicates what form of payout you provide to the publisher. In brief:

Payout Method: This option indicates which payout model to use, whether it’s the default model or another such as tiered revenue or revenue groups. You’ll likely only see “Default” available unless you’ve gone further in setting up your network than we expected in this article. This doesn’t need to be the same method as the one used in revenue above, but in most cases it will be.

Cost per Conversion: This is the amount your publisher earns based on the payout type. Depending on what you have selected as your Payout Type, this entry changes:

Goals, Settings & Tracking (Skipped)

The last three sections on this page relate to offer options that you can adjust later, as you learn more about creating offers. Not all options in Settings and Tracking are immediately available on the Create Offer page. Some may be disabled depending on your account settings or level of account.

For more information about these features, you can check out these other support articles:

Done with Revenue & Payout

Once you’re done, click Add Offer. The page that appears confirms that you’ve successfully created the offer, and provides options that are available now that the offer is made:
Continue this walkthrough to learn about retrieving and placing the offer’s conversion link.

Step 4: Place Offer Conversion Pixel

After completing Step 3, you should see a page that looks something like this:
If you successfully created the offer but see a different set of options, you may have selected a different option for Conversion Tracking in step 2.
Now that you’ve created the offer, let’s hook your site up to register the conversion. To do that, first you get the offer conversion pixel, then you place it on one of your site’s pages. That page will be your conversion page.

Once copied, paste this offer conversion pixel code into a page on your site. To do that, you need to know two things: which page to use for your conversion page, and where on that page to place the conversion pixel code.

Important: Typically, you’ll send this to your advertisers for them to use instead of you using this code directly. For the purposes of this test, we’ll pretend that you’re also your advertiser.

Start by copying the conversion pixel code from the Pixel Code field. Your code will look something like this:

What page to use for tracking conversions: The page you place the conversion pixel code should be for whatever point or task indicates that a user has completed a conversion, such as completing a purchase or filling out a form. Many clients put this code on a “Thank You” or “Your Order is Complete” page. This tutorial can’t tell you which is the right page for your site.

Where on the page to place the code: The best place to place the conversion pixel code is right after the opening <body> tag, as in this example. (Our example page is actually much bigger than this, so we’re only showing you the important part.)
Once you’ve placed the conversion pixel code on your conversion page, move on to testing the offer.

Step 5: Test Your Offer

With the conversion pixel placed on your conversion page, you can test the offer to make sure it’s properly set up. Back on the conversion pixel page, find the Test Link at the bottom. This test tracking link works just like a normal tracking link, but flags the conversion as an “Employee Test” in your conversion report and assigns “testoffer” to the partner sub ID 1 and source parameters.

Tip: These parameter values aren’t required for testing, and simply being logged in to your TUNE account treats the click as a test link.

Go through the offer as a normal user would, and once you hit the conversion page you can check your conversion report by going to Reports > Conversion Report. Here, you can hopefully see your conversion:

If you see a conversion, congratulations! You successfully set up and tested your offer.

If you don’t, your search result may be cached, meaning your browser didn’t immediately refresh the search result even though you clicked refresh on it. To get a fresh search result, change one of the parameters, such as by checking the Partner box in the Data section of Options (or unchecking, if already checked). Then click the Run Report button.

If you still can’t see your conversion, contact our support team at [email protected].

A Note on Testing Server Postbacks

The method for testing server postbacks is not the same as for conversion pixels. See our Postback Tracking article for details.